3 reasons you shouldn’t hire a social media recluse

We’ve all heard stories of employees getting in trouble for their social media activities during and even after office hours.

But with the recent embrace of social media access within workplaces to boost employee value, hiring someone without knowledge of, or limited use of social networking, might hamper your employee’s ROI rates.

Still not convinced? Here are three reasons why.

1) Lower productivity rates

The advent of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other popular social media sites have been known to decrease concentration span and ability to analyse in detail.

However, research has also found that employees who used various types of social media and digital modes of communication were more creative and collaborative at work, and thus more productive.

As opposed to the conventional train of thought, connectivity altered workers’ sense of “presence” and helped rather than hindered the effective completion of collective tasks.

2) Fewer opportunities for brand development

Leveraging employee PR power is not a mind-blowing concept, but its potential is higher than ever thanks to the proliferation of social media.

As this article on LinkedIn suggests, using your employees’ social media account facilitates the spread of your brand.

“Say you have 1,000 Twitter followers. Your daily tweets reach those 1,000 – if you’re lucky. Now let’s suppose you have 1,000 employees, each with an average of 1,000 followers. If they start retweeting your updates, you could suddenly be reaching 1 million followers,” the article reported.

Now who wouldn’t want to hire anyone with an active Twitter account?

3) Reduced business expertise

With data being an extremely important tool of all aspects of businesses, garnering knowledge of competitive trends and statistics remains a key strategy for any industry.

Recent findings concluded 69% of marketers use social media to gather marketplace intelligence. The figure isn’t surprising considering the rapidity and depth of information social media sites can provide to any consumer.

Any employee without access or limited usage of social media sites may have other avenues to procure this knowledge, but it remains undeniable that this highly effective tool remains underutilised.